To Avoid Counting Civilian Deaths, Obama Re-Defined “Militant” to Mean “All Military-Age Males in a Strike Zone”
May 30th, 2012Via: Salon:
Virtually every time the U.S. fires a missile from a drone and ends the lives of Muslims, American media outlets dutifully trumpet in headlines that the dead were ”militants” – even though those media outlets literally do not have the slightest idea of who was actually killed. They simply cite always-unnamed “officials” claiming that the dead were “militants.” It’s the most obvious and inexcusable form of rank propaganda: media outlets continuously propagating a vital claim without having the slightest idea if it’s true.
Rothschild’s RIT Capital Partners Buys 37% of Rockefeller Financial Services, Inc.
May 30th, 2012Via: Reuters:
Two of the most glamorous names in global finance are linking up, with the Rothschild banking dynasty agreeing to buy a stake in the Rockefeller group’s wealth and asset management business to get a long-sought foothold in the United States.
Rothschild’s London-listed RIT Capital Partners (RCP.L) said on Wednesday it was buying the 37 percent stake from French group Societe Generale’s (SOGN.PA) private banking arm for an undisclosed sum.
The transatlantic union brings together David Rockefeller, 96, and Jacob Rothschild, 76 – two family patriarchs whose personal relationship spans five decades.
Rockefeller & Co traces its origins back to 1882 when it was founded as one of the world’s first family offices by John D. Rockefeller to manage his personal wealth.
Since then it has developed into a wealth advisory group administering assets of $34 billion.
The Rothschild banking dynasty began when Mayer Amschel Rothschild started a business in Frankfurt in the late 18th century.
Japan: Mobile Phone with Geiger Counter
May 30th, 2012I’m surprised that it took so long to appear.
Via: Wired:
Following Fukushima’s nuclear disaster, Japanese citizens have been especially wary of radiation exposure. SoftBank on Tuesday revealed a new smartphone to answer such concerns. The company’s Pantone 5 107SH is the world’s first phone with a built-in geiger counter, capable of measuring radiation levels within 20 percent accuracy.
Pantone-branded products are always colorful — and they should be given that Pantone makes the world’s most popular color-matching system. Following suit, the Pantone 5 comes in eight vibrant colors: black, white, purple, yellow, blue, orange, and two types of pink. The phone runs Android 4.0 with a Sharp skin, and features a 3.7-inch, 854×480 LCD screen.
Solar Powered Ground Sensors That Can Transmit Information for Decades
May 29th, 2012Via: Wired:
America is supposed to wind down its war in Afghanistan by 2014. But U.S. forces may continue to track Afghans for years after the conflict is officially done. Palm-sized sensors, developed for the American military, will remain littered across the Afghan countryside — detecting anyone who moves nearby and reporting their locations back to a remote headquarters. Some of these surveillance tools could be buried in the ground, all-but-unnoticeable by passersby. Others might be disguised as rocks, with wafer-sized, solar-rechargeable batteries that could enable the sensors’ operation for perhaps as long as two decades, if their makers are to be believed.
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The new models are dramatically smaller and consume far less power, enabling them to operate for months — maybe even years — at a time with only the slimmest chance of being detected. Lockheed calls them “field and forget” systems for “persistent surveillance.”
And they won’t just be used overseas. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol today employs more than 7,500 UGSs on the Mexican border to spot illegal migrants. Defense contractors believe one of the biggest markets for the next generation of the sensors will be here at home.
“They could be used for border security or even around corporate headquarters,” Plyburn tells Danger Room.
Western Nations Expel Syrian Diplomats
May 29th, 2012Via: Wall Street Journal:
Syria’s international isolation deepened Tuesday as several Western countries said they were expelling Syrian diplomats, in a coordinated response to the killing of 108 civilians last week in a single attack.
The U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, France, Germany and some other European countries announced Tuesday they were kicking out senior Syrian senior envoys. The U.S., which had already downgraded diplomatic relations earlier this year, said Tuesday that Syrian chargé d’affaires Zuheir Jabbour has been given 72 hours to leave following the tank and artillery attack on the village of Houla.
“We hold the Syrian government responsible for this slaughter of innocent lives,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said in a statement. “This massacre is the most unambiguous indictment to date of the Syrian government’s flagrant violations of its United Nations Security Council obligations.”
Stubborn Infection, Spread by Insects, Called ‘The New AIDS of the Americas’
May 29th, 2012I’ve never heard of this.
Via: New York Times:
Chagas disease, caused by parasites transmitted to humans by blood-sucking insects, has been named “the new AIDS of the Americas” in a lengthy editorial published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.
Wikipedia: Chagas Disease
Tepco Admits Fukushima Disaster Released 2.5 Times More Radiation Than Indicated by Initial Government Lies
May 29th, 2012Imagine my shock. But if they’re admitting this, what is the real number?
Via: Reuters:
The radiation released in the first days of the Fukushima nuclear disaster was almost 2-1/2 times the amount first estimated by Japanese safety regulators, the operator of the crippled plant said in a report released on Thursday.
Tokyo Electric Power said its own analysis conducted over the past year put the amount of radiation released in the first three weeks of the accident at about one-sixth the radiation released during the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
“If this information had been available at the time, we could have used it in planning evacuations,” Tepco spokesman Junichi Matsumoto told a news conference.
Because radiation sensors closest to the plant were knocked out by the March 11, 2011 quake and the tsunami, the utility based its estimate on other monitoring posts and data collected by Japanese government agencies.
Tepco, set to be nationalised in July in exchange for a Japanese government bailout, estimated meltdowns at three Fukushima reactors released about 900,000 terabecquerels of radioactive substances into the air during March.
That was 2-1/2 times the amount of the first estimate by Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency in April last year and about 17 percent more than the highest estimate provided by the government safety agency.
Related: Radioactive Cesium Seen in Tuna Off California
Naoto Kan, Japan’s Former Leader, Condemns Nuclear Power
May 29th, 2012Via: New York Times:
In an unusually stark warning, Japan’s prime minister during last year’s nuclear crisis told a parliamentary inquiry on Monday that the country should discard nuclear power as too dangerous, saying the Fukushima accident had pushed Japan to the brink of “national collapse.”
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He said he feared additional meltdowns could “release into the air and sea many times, no, many dozens of times, many hundreds of times the radiation released by Chernobyl.”
Those fears led to the most extraordinary moment of the crisis, when Mr. Kan walked into Tepco’s headquarters after being told the company wanted to evacuate its staff from the crippled plant. He demanded that they stay, saying he was prepared to put his own life on the line to prevent the disaster from worsening.
He also defended his visit to the plant on the day after the earthquake, which has been widely criticized for distracting plant personnel at a crucial juncture in their efforts to save the overheating reactors. Mr. Kan told the panel that he wanted to get an assessment directly from the plant manager because he felt Tepco officials in Tokyo were not giving him enough information.
But his strongest comments came at the end of his testimony, when a panel member asked if he had any advice for the current prime minister. Mr. Kan replied that the accident had brought Japan to the brink of evacuating metropolitan Tokyo and its 30 million residents, and that the loss of the capital would have paralyzed the national government, leading to “a collapse of the nation’s ability to function.”
He said the prospect of losing Tokyo made him realize that nuclear power was just too risky, that the consequences of an accident too large for Japan to accept.
“It is impossible to ensure safety sufficiently to prevent the risk of a national collapse,” Mr. Kan said. “Experiencing the accident convinced me that the best way to make nuclear plants safe is not to rely on them, but rather to get rid of them.”
Made in China: Backdoor Found in Chip Used by U.S. Military
May 29th, 2012Via: Information Age:
A microchip used by the US military and manufactured in China contains a secret “backdoor” that means it can be shut off or reprogrammed without the user knowing, according to researchers at Cambridge University’s Computing Laboratory.
The unnamed chip, which the researchers claim is widely used in military and industrial applications, is “wide open to intellectual property theft, fraud and reverse engineering of the design to allow the introduction of a backdoor or Trojan”, they said.
The discovery was made during testing of a new technique to extract the encryption key from chips, developed by Cambridge spin-off Quo Vadis Labs.
The “bug” is in the actual chip itself, rather than the firmware installed on the devices that use it. This means there is no way to fix it than to replace the chip altogether.
BBC News Uses Photo from Iraq to Illustrate Syrian Massacre
May 29th, 2012Via: Telegraph:
The BBC is facing criticism after it accidentally used a picture taken in Iraq in 2003 to illustrate the senseless massacre of children in Syria.
Photographer Marco di Lauro said he nearly “fell off his chair” when he saw the image being used, and said he was “astonished” at the failure of the corporation to check their sources.
The picture, which was actually taken on March 27, 2003, shows a young Iraqi child jumping over dozens of white body bags containing skeletons found in a desert south of Baghdad.
It was posted on the BBC news website today under the heading “Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows”.
The caption states the photograph was provided by an activist and cannot be independently verified, but says it is “believed to show the bodies of children in Houla awaiting burial”.
